The Olympics are the most emotional moment in an athlete’s life — but when Philippe Marquis gets to Sochi, it may actually be an emotional comedown for him.

That’s how much he’s been through just to get there.

Within the span of a week he was told he was almost certainly going, definitely not going, and then, on Wednesday night, that he was going again.

“What a crazy roller coaster I’ve been through,” said Marquis, who is now Canada’s fourth in men’s moguls.

On Tuesday, with the Canadian moguls team flying to France to prepare for the Olympics, Marquis was preparing to go on the lower-tier North American tour to stay in shape and find a little fun. He was thinking of surfing and hanging out with a friend in New York for the Super Bowl.

“I’ll try to do some of the most bad ass and cool things I can do in the next couple weeks,” he said on Tuesday. “So when I see the boys and they tell me all their Sochi stories I’ll have some more interesting stuff to tell.”

A call from the team’s high performance director on Wednesday night changed all that.

Megan Gunning, a women’s half-pipe skier, blew out her knee on Wednesday in qualifications for the X Games in Aspen and — with the complicated freestyle qualification system — that opened up a spot for Marquis.

“It was just surreal. I didn’t jump up and down because I’d had so much bad news the last week, so I was like, that’s great but let’s wait until it’s really official. I just didn’t want to feel heartbroken again,” he said.

Once he got his plane ticket on Thursday, he knew it was real and the 24-year-old rush-packed to catch up with the moguls team in France.

Canada is limited to 26 athletes in all five freestyle disciplines — aerials, half-pipe, slopestyle, moguls and ski cross — no matter how good they are.

That’s why Marquis, who won a bronze medal at the Sochi test event a year ago and is ranked 12th in the world, wasn’t going to make it. He originally lost his Olympic spot to a combination of strong results from ski cross athlete Chris Del Bosco and women’s half-pipe skier Keltie Hansen, he said.

But the overall ranking system is also how he ultimately got his ticket to Sochi back when Gunning was injured. The 21-year-old from Calgary injured her knee so severely she is out for the season, the team said.

The end of one skier’s Olympic dream was the revival for another.

“It’s unfair in a way, but it’s part of our sport,” Marquis said of the IOC quota when he thought he was the odd man out.

“We knew at the beginning of the year we’d be trying to bring the best team between apples and tomatoes and so many different kinds of sport and styles of athletes.”

Going to the Olympics is something that Marquis has been working towards for more than a decade and the dream of competing on the world’s biggest stage sustained him through some 18,000 hours of training and two shoulder surgeries.

But in all those hours, he never imagined it would happen the way it did.

He was told he needed to finish seventh or better in last Sunday’s World Cup in Val St. Come, Que., to secure his Olympic spot.

When he came down the run he thought he’d done enough.

“I looked at my brother and he thought I had it,” Marquis said, of Vincent, who was fourth in the Vancouver Olympics.

Then, his scores came up. He was fifth, with three more skiers to go.

When American Bradley Wilson came down and scored a little higher for a run very similar to his, Marquis dropped to his knees and starting crying. At that point he was sure his Olympic dream had just died.

The two men still left to go were his Canadian teammates, defending Olympic gold medallist Alex Bilodeau and reigning world champion Mikael Kingsbury.

Both men booked their tickets to Sochi long ago so they could have thrown their races to let Marquis qualify, but that goes against the nature of these athletes — who are where they are because of their competitiveness — and the very nature of sport itself.

Such a thing would have been “unsporting,” Marquis said.

“I know Alex had a really hard time dealing with the situation, being the last guy on top and knowing that if he did his run he would kick me out of my Olympic dream.”

In the end, Bilodeau was first — for the third World Cup in a row — Kingsbury second and Marc-Antoine Gagnon, another Canadian and one of Marquis’ closest friends, finished seventh.

Marquis wound up eighth, one spot from where he needed to be.

“I don’t know how life can throw me a more stressful situation than what I just went through,” Marquis said, of his whirlwind qualifying process.

When his teammates heard the news that he was joining them after all, they called and “pretty much screamed in the phone,” Marquis said. “They were madly happy for me.”

As a kid, Marquis put stars on the knees of his snow pants to mimic Jean-Luc Brassard, made famous for his gold medal in the 1994 Lillehammer Games.

His own Olympic ambitions started growing when he watched the 2002 Salt Lake City Games on TV with his family. They were fully cemented by the time he watched his older brother compete in 2010 Vancouver Games.

“Next time, it’s my turn,” he told himself.

It almost wasn’t.

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